Virtualization techniques have gained popularity and are now commonplace in data centers and other environments in which it is useful to increase the efficiency with which computing resources are used. In a virtualized environment, one or more virtual machines are instantiated on an underlying computer, or host, and share the resources of the underlying computer. To provide the resources necessary for each of the virtual machines, a hypervisor may execute on top of the host to abstract the physical components of the underlying computer and provide virtual components to the virtual machine. In some implementations, the hypervisor may be implemented at a layer above the host operating system, while in other implementations the hypervisor may be integrated with the host's operating system.
In some virtualization environments, various virtual hard disks (VHDs), virtual machine disks (VMDKs), virtual disk images (VDIs), or other virtualized volumes may be attached or mounted to the virtual machines. These virtualized volumes may contain files, such as pictures, videos, music, and the like, but may further include applications that are capable of execution using the allocated virtual machine resources. However, the virtualized volumes may be specific to a hypervisor provider, preventing volumes from being attached to virtual machines using alternative hypervisor providers.